Sacrifice: James Mission 4

For this mission, James has some kinda cool stuff!


Flummox
1000 Mana, 3 Souls

The Flummox is James' artillery unit -and it comes a few levels earlier than literally everybody else's artillery, which can be a fairly significant advantage all by itself. The Flummox has poor damage to compensate for its early arrival, so once everybody else starts fielding artillery James falls behind some, but that period where he's got artillery and no one else does is pretty amazing. It's actually a lot more impressively cool in multiplayer, being both even more useful for 'bullying' an enemy if you get the edge in levels (An option not available in the campaign) and potentially helping on the flipside where the enemy gets a level or two ahead of you and starts fielding units best put down with artillery, and hey, you actually already have that!

The Flummox's direct damage performance might be worse than eg the Abominations once they're both on the table, but the Flummox also knocks down everything around the impact point, which for one thing means the Flummox is shockingly good at winning range-on-range standoffs. A horde of Flummox will, with a bit of luck, end up stunlocking significant portions of an enemy ranged army so they can't contribute much even though the Flummox is killing them slower than other artillery would, so even though their damage output is a bit lacking compared to other artillery they're still worth considering for more than just early artillery access.

Their slow speed can be really inconvenient, particularly since their huge range often leads to them standing far back from the fighting so that once a fight is over they still have a good chunk of ground to cover before they can catch up to you. This can be fairly irritating in the campaign, which generally has much larger maps than multiplayer does and perhaps more importantly the campaign tends to be designed under the assumption you're fairly constantly advancing, aside the occasional Teleport back to protect an awkwardly-placed structure. In multiplayer I imagine this is a more tolerable flaw since there's more in the way of give and take. And if there isn't, the enemy doesn't have strongpoints of Guardianed creatures like in the campaign. You'll just be stomping them and not care that your Flummoxes have fallen behind. So either way, this is more a campaign issue.

Like the Abomination, the Flummox is badly weak to melee damage and a little weak to ranged splash damage. I still don't get the purpose of the latter.


Erupt
800 Mana

You might recognize this spell -it showed up several times in scripted events in the Charnel campaign, for whatever reason, and there was even a wizard using it at one point.

Erupt is straightforward-seeming but kind of wonky. It targets a location, substantially distorts the terrain -which can actually be used to buy time for your units to get into position, since it blocks line of sight and thus line of fire on ranged units- and then the terrain returns to nearly-normal while an explosion does damage to everything in the area, launches anything on top of the target location away from it, and then a shockwave will knock down anything in a fairly large area beyond the launch zone. The overall result is that it does a little bit of splash damage, temporarily prevents a bunch of enemies from fighting, and maybe hurls some of them into the abyss -this is a bit of a running theme with James, that he provides an unusually large number of options for killing enemies by abyssing them.

In practice, Erupt is a... not bad spell, but a bit underwhelming for how visually impressive it is, and the competition tends to be more useful. The fact that it has a fairly significant lead-up time where you're immobilized also makes it potentially dangerous to use, not to mention easily interrupted by a canny opponent. The AI also tends to end up with strung-out battlegroups due to how it operates, only rarely providing the chance to really use Erupt for maximum effect, so it's especially dubious in the campaign. It's also hampered by the fact that its knockdown radius is so large it tends to disrupt your own forces -you'll regularly see me knocked down by my own Erupts from here on out. And of course it's unfriendly to using ground melee units at all, since they'll get caught up in it for sure.

I quite like the idea of it, but I think it could've used a bit more oomph, or been made a little more focused in its utility. It's not really a mass-damage spell, it's too situational/unreliable at abyssing, and it's not that great a disruption effect, and the collective of all three possibilities doesn't have any particularly significant synergy.

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The mission itself is actually one of my favorite 2v1 wizard battles, since the Ragman straight-up dies if you kill him, and he has no access to an Altar or Shrine so he actually can't steal your souls at all. He's thus a meaningful problem, but not the kind of infuriating problem that some other 2v1 setups present. You might notice I actually straight-up abandon a friendly body in the Ragman's 'territory' -I hadn't actually specifically remembered he lacked Shrines, but that was totally a safe decision.

Outside that quirk and the side mission of destroying all the Plague Worts -which results in getting a Boon if you pull it off, unsurprisingly- the mission itself is very straightforward. Just kill one wizard and banish the other. This is, of course, the other Ragman mission I mentioned two missions ago, where he has 25% physical resistance overall, so it's a bit of a nuisance to actually kill him, but not too hard.

It is a little irritating how vague the game is about the Plague Worts, though. Until you've destroyed the last one, you don't get any feedback on how close you are to being done, and they're not marked on your minimap in the fog or anything. The very first time I did this mission, I figured I'd gotten all of them, and I hadn't because... seriously, vague.

Sirocco isn't just plain a gamebreaker at this point, but she's still hideously powerful and more or less impossible to get killed without strenuous stupidity being involved. If I'd thought to send her right after the Ragman he'd probably have died in the first, I dunno, three minutes of the mission? She wouldn't break the rest of the mission, but she can pretty well trivialize the Ragman.

On a different note, Marduk showed up. He always does that on the fourth mission, it doesn't matter which god you picked. In most cases you'll wander a bit away from your Altar and have it trigger. I'm... not entirely sure why it wasn't just made to happen as part of the opening cinematic, honestly. His speech doesn't vary, either, nor does Eldred and Zyzyx's reactions. It can get annoying, particularly since you can't skip cinematics in Sacrifice. You can skip dialogue, but if there's anything other than dialogue going on -such as Marduk appearing and disappearing- you'll still have to sit through all that, not to mention you have to manually skip each and every single sentence. It's a fairly obnoxious middle ground between 'can't skip anything, go make a sandwich or something while you wait' and 'yeah, you've seen this before, feel free to skip past it'. It's most pertinent to the interludes and Marduk showing up -most other cinematics are either short enough it's not too irritating to sit through them or are more or less pure dialogue you can mash right through. (eg the Astral Realm conversations)

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Plot-wise, we've killed off the Ragman, kinda making it largely pointless the game tried to play him up as a big deal -why was he without an Altar here anyway?- and also gotten confirmation that the Pyro/Charnel alliance applies in this version of events too.

Thhhhat's about it. James early missions are all a bit weak, narratively.

Ragman-wise, this more clearly conveys what I was talking about of a loss of nuance. Eldred isn't reacting to the fact that the Ragman is 'terrorforming' James territory, and he wouldn't even if I'd done Charnel Mission 1 in this run. This could've been a brief little sub-plot of Eldred, say, releasing the Ragman, feeling a bit slimy and going to James to make up for what he's just done only to find James is pointing him right back at fixing the problem he helped make, to then not take very seriously his own role in the Ragman's release ("Meh, the Ragman is just one man. What's so bad about releasing one man?") until this mission where he gets upset because the Ragman's terrorforming puts him in mind of the final days of Jhera, and then resolving to stop the Ragman because he refuses to have another world die. This would tie in nicely to Eldred's insistence he will stop Marduk this time, and provide some specificity and nuance to Eldred's character in general.

Instead Eldred and Zyzyx tend to just relate things that happened with minimal emotional investment in anything that isn't directly tied to Marduk. Bar... a few oddities we'll be talking about more down the line.

Oh well.

See you next James mission.